Maroonage and Flight:

An Overview

Paper presented at the Fourth Annual International Conference at the Gilder Lerhman Center for the

Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

Unshackled Spaces: Fugitives from Slavery and Maroon Communities in the Americas

Yale University, 6 December 2002

Loren Schweninger

In 1821, the South Carolina slave Joe, who lived near the state capital of

Columbia, escaped from his plantation and began a one-hundred-mile journey as a

runaway slave. Following the river systems to the southeast, he went along the

Congaree and Santee rivers to the low-lying forest and swamp areas stretching back

from the coast. He went undetected until he reached the Georgetown District, where he

was confronted by a planter named George Ford, described by his neighbors as a

“worthy and respectable Citizen.” Joe rose up against the white man, killed him, and

fled into the woods along the lower Santee River.i

He quickly convinced other outlying runaways from plantations in the Claremont,

Clarendon, St. Johns, St. Stephens, and Richland parishes and districts to join him.

They established a base camp deep in the woods. Joe--or Forest as he came to be

known because of his ability to disappear without a trace into the dense tree-lined river

areas--was a born leader of men: bold, intelligent, cunning, and fearless. He knew how

and when to strike and how and where to escape. During the next two years he led a 1

band of runaways as they pillaged, stole, attacked, and wreaked havoc on plantations in

the area. “Most of the runaways flew to his Camp and he soon became their head and

their life,” a group of eighty slave owners, farmers, and planters explained in a petition

to the state legislature. “He had the art and the address to inspire his followers with the

most Wild and dangerous enthusiasm.” The petitioners continued:

He was so cunning and artful as to elude pursuit and so daring and bold at particular times when no force was at hand as to put every thing at defiance. Emboldened by his successes and his seeming good fortune he plunged deeper and deeper into Crime until neither fear nor danger could deter him first from threatening and then from executing a train of mischief we believe quite without parrellel in this Country.

Local residents asked for help from the “proper Military department” and

petitioned the Governor to assist them in bringing Forest to justice. Meanwhile, Ford’s

relatives offered an enormous reward of one thousand dollars for his capture. When

one considers that the average reward for a runaway slave in South Carolina at this

time was between ten and fifteen dollars and that it would take a common laborer

several years to earn one thousand dollars, to offer such a sum was truly extraordinary.

In 1822, the South Carolina General Assembly awarded the leader of a militia unit $160

for supplies following an extensive search for the slave. But Forest remained at large.

His and his men’s intimate knowledge of the countryside, its hidden swamps and

overgrown creeks, surpassed that of all others.

2

Finally, in August 1823, the planters and slave owners in the vicinity organized

themselves into “companies as Infantry.” They traversed Santee River Swamp from

“the Confluence of the two rivers that form it to Munys Ferry a distance even by land,”

they noted, “of sixty miles.” In fact, the distance they searched was many miles more

considering the numerous tributaries and meandering riverbeds. They trudged through

the dense foliage in the insufferable heat of late summer and fought off insects and

snakes, searching as many possible hideaway locations as they could. Finally, fatigued

by living in the wilderness and dispirited by the enormity of their task, they called off the

expedition. Indeed, they complained, they might have passed within a few feet of the

slaves and not known they were even in the same proximity so dense were the vines,

undergrowth, and cypress trees.

It was at this point that Royal, a slave patroon who knew Forest, came to their

aid. Owned by a Richland District woman who promised him freedom if he provided

assistance, Royal led a small company of white men to a landing near Forest’s camp.

As the slave owners lay flat in Royal’s boat, Royal beckoned Forest and his followers to

come out of the woods. The fugitives trusted Royal and came toward the boat,

discovering his betrayal too late. As they began to flee the whites rose up and

discharged their muskets in “a single well directed fire” that killed Forest and three of his

followers instantly. The rest of the gang were either chased down and shot, captured

and hanged, or “frightened to their respective homes.”ii That Forest was able to avoid

capture for more than two years was remarkable. There was little doubt that his brief

career as a rebel leader along the lower Santee River struck fear into the hearts of slave

owners.

3

Judging from the response of area slave owners and farmers, Forest’s activities

were unparalleled and unprecedented in their audacity and their cunning, and the

runaways achieved a greater success than many of their counterparts. However,

Forest and his band of rebels were by no means unique. Beginning in the early years of

South Carolina slavery, outlying slaves established settlements in the lowland swamps

and backcountry. While their numbers fluctuated over time, pockets of outlying slaves

were always a part of the region’s landscape. During the 1730s, some fugitives fled to

Spanish Florida, especially to a community populated by free blacks called Garcia Real

de Santa Teresa de Mose.iii In 1765, some forty runaways, including women and

children, lived in a settlement with four substantial buildings in the swamp north of the

Savannah River. They subsisted by hunting and fishing and trading with plantation

slaves. They possessed blankets, pots, pails, axes, tools, shoes, and fifteen bushels of

“rough Rice.”iv

In the Chesapeake region, the terrain and majority white population made

establishing runaway encampments difficult. One group of African-born slaves ran

away to the mountainous backcountry and lowland swamps. There, according to

several scholars, men, women and children attempted to recreate an African society on

the frontier. In 1729, another band of a dozen slaves absconded from a James River

plantation taking tools, clothing, provisions, and arms; they later established a farming

community near Lexington. However, such endeavors were rare and by the late

eighteenth century, with the decline of Africans in the slave population, these

resurrected African enclaves became virtually nonexistent.v

4

Before and during the Revolutionary War, outlying colonies in South Carolina and

Georgia grew in size, and after the war bands of runaways openly defied local

authorities. One group of more than one hundred fugitive slaves established a small

fort twenty miles north of the mouth of the Savannah River. They called themselves

“the King of England’s soldiers,” and they raided farms and plantations and even

attacked the Georgia militia. Thomas Pinckney, the Governor of South Carolina,

informed the legislature that this and other fugitive gangs posed a serious problem; they

were armed and included those who had fled to the British during the war. They were

waging guerilla warfare against local residents.vi

5

During the Revolutionary era, colonies of runaways in West Florida and

Louisiana grew as well, evolving from small enclaves of African and Indian raiders to

what one author termed permanent settlements. Their residents were well-armed and

moved “freely through trackless swamps and dense forests.” They established

“independent settlements that equaled plantations in complexity.” Some hunted and

fished while others raised corn and rice. In either case they traded with plantation

slaves who provided them with supplies and occasionally sold their handicrafts in New

Orleans. Many among them had friends and kin on plantations. One of the largest

sanctuaries was Gaillardeland, an area equidistant between New Orleans and the

mouth of the Mississippi River. The inspirational leader of the group was Juan Malo, a

runaway from the German Coast north of New Orleans, who led raids on plantations,

rustled cattle, and taunted Spanish authorities.vii From the colonial period until the

end of slavery, bands of slaves, living in isolated, heavily wooded or swampy areas, or

running to the mountains and beyond, attempted to maintain a separate existence.

Some of these groups sustained their cohesiveness for several years, a few for longer

periods. They made forays into populated farming sections for food, clothing, livestock,

and trading items. Sometimes they bartered with free blacks, plantation slaves, and

whites who owned no slaves. The ideas of freedom enunciated during the

Revolutionary era may well have influenced the outlying slaves, and they may well have

been inspired by African “patterns of resistance and warfare.”viii But mainly they were

responding to local conditions and local circumstances. They were willing to rise up

against their owners and others by engaging in a futile, often suicidal, guerilla warfare.

6

Despite their ephemeral nature, runaway bands sometimes sent entire

communities into panic. During the summer of 1795, residents of Wilmington, North

Carolina, spoke of sporadic attacks from a “number of runaway Negroes,” who secreted

themselves in the swamps and woods during the day but came out at night to commit

“various depredations on the neighboring plantations.” They ambushed and killed a

white overseer before they were subdued and before their leader, the “General of the

Swamps,” was shot and killed by members of a posse.ix During the summer of 1821, an

“insurrection” broke out in Onslow County, North Carolina, when a number of “outlawed

and runaway Slaves and free Negroes” banded together. Located between the White

Oak and New rivers in the southeastern portion of the state, the long estuaries and

forested sections provided good cover. The outlying slaves “daily increased in strength

and numbers,” William L. Hill, head of a militia unit, wrote. Their bold acts of defiance

became so alarming that “no inhabitant could feel himself at any moment secure in his

life, person or property, from plunder, rapine, and devastation committed by them, daily

and nightly in every corner of the County.” They were well-armed, cunning, daring, and

desperate, Hill revealed; in broad daylight, they ravaged farms, burned houses, broke

into stores, and “ravished a number of females.” It took Hill’s two-hundred-man militia

unit twenty-six days searching through “Woods, Swamps & Marshes” to quell the

“Outlaws.”x

Even more audacious was a group of runaways in the Piedmont section of North

Carolina two decades later. In Halifax County, where deep ravines and rolling hills

rather than dense forest and impenetrable swamps provided cover, armed runaways

shot and killed livestock and threatened local farmers. When one farmer tried to pursue

them, the slaves killed and butchered seventy-five of his hogs. The fugitives then sent

word to him that if he would not hunt them again they would not kill any more of his

hogs; however, if he continued to stalk them, they would stop killing his hogs and kill

him instead. When another farmer, described as a “respectful Citizen,” was shot as he

returned home one evening, area planters petitioned the legislature. They demanded a

new law be enacted permitting them to shoot on sight slaves “lying out, lurking in the

woods swamps & other secret places doing serious injury to the public.” The citizens

also requested that the state treasury compensate the financial loss incurred by any

slave owners dispatched in such a manner.

The legislators sympathized with the plight of the farmers, but responded by

saying the “such a law would be unnecessarily cruel & sanguinary;” it would lead to

great abuses and would render slave property insecure and consequently diminish its

value. The law as it existed, a Select Committee pointed out, was sufficient to

“suppress the evil.” In 1741, North Carolina lawmakers enacted legislation permitting

any two justices of the peace to declare outlying slaves “outlaws,” thus permitting slave

owners, overseers, or other whites to shoot them on sight “without Accusation or

Impeachment of any Crime.”xi

7

Similar circumstances existed in other southern states, especially the Carolinas

and the lower tier of states from Georgia and Florida to Louisiana. Runaway bands hid

in remote to isolated areas and intimidated and harassed local farmers and planters.

Even “negro hunters” who came after them with tracking dogs were cautious about

pursuing them too far into the backcountry. Sometimes runaways attacked slave

owners and overseers; other times they committed “daring and atrocious” acts of

highway robbery on innocent travelers.xii During his 1850s tour of the South, Frederick

Law Olmsted stopped at a boardinghouse in Mississippi. After he had drifted off to

sleep, a fellow traveler entered the room, awakening him from his slumber. His new

roommate then took most of the sparse furniture in the room and pushed it against the

door. Next he placed two small revolvers on a small end table near his bed “so they

could be easily taken up as he lay in bed.” Even though it was a hot night and the room

was stuffy and uncomfortable, the traveler said he would not feel safe if anything were

left open. “‘You don’t know,’” he confided, “‘there maybe runaways around.’”xiii

8

Sometimes groups of runaways were able to sustain themselves without

marauding, pillaging or committing various “crimes.” In 1843, freeholders and other

white inhabitants of King William County, Virginia, asked the legislature to sell fifteen

hundred acres on the Pamunky River and other lands that were set aside during the

colonial era for the Pamunky Indians. The lands were only "set apart," not "granted

away," they argued. Now the tribe formed only a "small remnant" of the population,

having "so largely mingled with the negro race as to have obliterated all striking features

of Indian extraction." The lands, the petitioners stated, are now inhabited by two

"unincorporated bands of free mulattoes in the midst of a large slave holding

community." These free people of color might easily be converted "into an instrument of

deadly annoyance to the white inhabitants by northern fanaticism." The lands have also

become a haven for worthless and abandoned whites and fugitive slaves. In short,

tracts of land designated for Indians were a "harbor for every one who wishes

concealment.”xiv

Historians have long been interested in these and other groups of outlying slaves

in the southern United States. In 1939, Herbert Aptheker wrote a seminal article,

published in the Journal of Negro History, titled “Maroons Within the Present Limits of

the United States.” In subsequent years, Kenneth Stampp, Gerald Mullin, Eugene

Genovese, Peter Kolchin, Ira Berlin, Phillip D. Morgan, among others, have commented

on, as one historian stated, “groups of escaped slaves known as maroons that found

refuge on the frontier and in unsettled internal areas.”xv In our recent book Runaway

Slaves, John Hope Franklin and I also touch on fugitive gangs who survived by their

wits and violence.xvi

9

If, as Peter Kolchin suggests, all history is comparative, it might then be

beneficial to place these southern United States fugitive bands into the broader

contextual framework of maroonage in other parts of the Americas. The literature about

Maroon societies elsewhere is far more comprehensive than writings about groups of

runaways in the United States. Scholars have examined communities created by

runaway slaves in the Spanish Americas (Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico); in the

French Caribbean (Saint-Domingue, Martinique); and in Brazil, Guiana, Haiti, and

Jamaica.xvii Some of these societies evolved into powerful states with thousands of

members and survived for generations, even centuries. This “marronage on a grand

scale,” Richard Price argues, struck directly at “the foundations of the plantation system,

presenting military and economic threats which often taxed the colonists to their very

limits.” In a number of cases, whites were forced to negotiate with their former

slaves.xviii Of course, maroon societies were not monolithic; each bore the stamp of its

geographic location, resulting in distinct differences, including differences among those

who were allowed to join. In addition, it was not always an African heritage that bound

them together; the New World realities of geography, treatment, language, and the ratio

of blacks to whites also played a major role.xix

Even considering these variations, runaway groups in colonial America and the

United States were quite different from those in other parts of the Americas. Indeed, the

very term “maroon” meant something different to southerners who owned slaves. Its

usage in the West Indies, as a corruption of the Spanish cimarron, meaning “wild” or

“untamed,” was discarded; instead, “maroon” was employed as an adjective to describe

a pleasure party, especially a hunting or fishing excursion that lasted several days.

Only the Great Dismal Swamp, on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, and the

marshes and morasses of south-central Florida sheltered generational communities of

outlying slaves in North America, and even these two were not comparable to maroon

societies in other parts of the New World. During the Second Seminole War (1837-

1843), for example, the federal government defeated the Florida maroons and removed

them and their Indian allies to the American West.

10

The obvious question is why did such differences emerge? Why was slavery in

colonial America and the United States so unique in this regard? Scholars have

advanced a number of reasons. Slaves in North America suffered less from disease,

were better fed, worked comparatively less, and lived on farms and plantations with

resident owners as opposed to the many absentee owner plantations in the Caribbean

and Latin America. The smaller proportion of African-born slaves and the larger

percentage of whites in the general population in British North America was also a

mitigating factor. Others have argued that there were fewer places to establish

separate communities in the United States compared with the impenetrable mountains

and forests of Hispaniola or Jamaica. Furthermore, the periodic instability of colonial

governments in the Americas gave slaves more opportunities to escape.

While all of the comparisons delineated above have some validity, one factor with

equal importance has not been emphasized by scholars. Perhaps colonial America and

the United State provide the best example of the futility of creating a separate society of

runaway slaves in the Americas. It was not due to its geography; lack of remote and

isolated locations abounded. The recesses along the rivers of Virginia, North and South

Carolina, and Georgia, as well as the dense forests of Alabama and Mississippi, and the

isolated islands and bayous of the Lower Mississippi River Valley provided many

possible locations. One observer noted that the islands in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana

were desolate, isolated and located in the most “remote corner of the Globe.”xx Indeed,

it was striking that twenty or thirty miles from several of the largest cities in the South–-

Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, New Orleans–-there were areas where, as was the case

for Forest, fugitive slaves could easily conceal themselves.

11

The problem from a slave’s perspective was the determination and vengeance of

whites who rooted out and destroyed the camps of runaways. A recent study of slave

patrols in the Carolinas and Virginia reveals how these patrols, consisting of slave

owners and other whites, effectively destroyed the outlying bands. The patrols were far

more active and, as time passed, more successful, especially in discovering groups of

fugitive slaves, than scholars have previously thought. Following his successful (and

rare) escape from the Lower South, Charles Ball noted that he ran only between

midnight and three o’clock in the morning when the patrollers were resting. From

nightfall until midnight and from three until daylight, “the patrol[s] are watchful, and

always traversing the country in quest of negros."xxi Slave owners, overseers, and other

whites formed their own search parties when the patrols were unsuccessful.

At the same time Forest was moving up and down the Santee River, another

group of runaways formed in Christ Church Parish. The ringleader was a slave who

belonged to the estate of a recently deceased resident. He was joined by another

runaway, who was owned by a female slaveholder; a family of five slaves, who had

recently been put up for sale, completed the band. The group managed to stay at large

for some time–-the ringleader for three years–-but planters in the area finally hunted

them down. “They continued out until October last, when the Children surrendered,” the

pursuing slave owners testified, “(one having been born in the woods) the Father and

Mother having been shot and killed.”

12

A short time later, another group in the same vicinity suffered a similar fate.

During their time as outlying slaves they wreaked havoc on nearby plantations,

butchering cattle, carrying off sheep and hogs, stealing tools and guns, and burning

outbuildings. One captured slave boasted that within a month he had butchered forty-

head of cattle. But search parties also caught this group that included eighteen slaves

from one plantation who ran off “under their driver;” one slave was shot and killed.xxii

The fate of a gang who hid out in a cypress swamp near New Orleans, raiding farms

and plantations, was similar. In 1837, the leader was killed and the runaways

disbanded.xxiii

Planters and slave owners could also call upon militia units to root out gangs of

runaways. Sometimes patrollers served in the local militia but often these groups,

primarily of young men, were separate from the patrols. Militiamen could command

larger numbers of men and were often called out when residents became especially

fearful of “conspiracy” or “insurrection.” The units included captains, sergeants, and

privates; they had legal authority to search virtually any slave quarters or plantation

house. In times of crises they could hold appointment through executive authority, as in

Virginia, in 1808, when special units were formed to suppress a rumored slave

insurrection. As one militiaman recounted, they were instructed to search “the negro

cabins, & take everything which we found in them, which bore a hostile aspect, such as

powder, shot &c.,” and were told to “apprehend every negro whom we found from his

home; & if he made any resistance, or ran from us, to fire on him immediately, unless he

could be stopped by other means.”xxiv In 1832, a major general in the Mississippi militia

called out a regiment because a “projected insurrection” had been discovered. He

ordered his men to break up into groups consisting of one officer and sixty men and

scour the area around Woodville to “apprehend all slaves under Suspicious

Circumstances.” It proved to be a false alarm, as it was in Georgia in 1848 when the

Glynn County Rangers were given a similar order. Learning of a possible plot, Ranger

Captain Hugh F. Grant quickly mobilized a cavalry company and went out to “protect the

Community and County from insurrections.”xxv

13

Coincident with the growing success of patrols, slave owner search parties, and

the militia was the shrinkage of secluded areas that had previously provided cover for

runaways. This does not mean that inaccessible locations in the South totally

disappeared; however, by the 1840s and 1850s much of the land across the Black Belt

of Alabama, the Delta of Mississippi, and the sugar parishes of Louisiana was under

cultivation. The forests in these areas and in the Upper South had succumbed to the ax

while marshes were drained and lands reclaimed. The population density among white

land owners increased substantially in the west during the generation before the Civil

War. What were once remote and barely inhabited sections of Tennessee, Kentucky,

and Arkansas during the 1820s were spotted with farms and plantations by the 1850s.

The westward migration of owners and slaves was immense, as historians have noted,

and the demographic realities of the new, relatively heavily populated west shrunk the

possible sites for groups of absconders to remain hidden or at large.

14

But regardless of the landscape, it was clear that even in the eighteenth century,

runaways in the United States stood the best chance of success by going it alone. The

profile of runaway slaves in the Southern colonies and states remained remarkably

constant from one generation to the next. They were overwhelmingly young men in

their teens and twenties who set out by themselves to pass for free blacks or mingle in

urban areas with other runaways. Only about one out of five absconders was a woman.

Female slaves remained behind on the plantations and farms to care for their children

who might suffer grievously if taken on an escape attempt. Most of those who fled,

even in the second half of the eighteenth century, were American-born slaves, or

Creoles; many among them spoke, acted, dressed, and behaved in a manner

indistinguishable from free people of color. They were not easily spotted from their

physical appearances or demeanor. This profile remained unchanged, even after the

infusion of African-born blacks, in what one author calls a re-Africanization of the Lower

South, in the decade prior to the 1808 prohibition of the African slave trade.xxvi

If runaway gangs seldom lasted more than a year or two and often ended with many

among them being killed, some individual slaves managed to sustain themselves in

freedom by posing as free blacks. The towns and cities of the South became harbors

for escaped slaves and a number of them, especially the most wily and skilled, were

able to hire their own time and sometimes meld into the free black population. Although

there were ebbs and flows in the economies of southern cities, there were few periods

when hired slaves were not in demand. Wages varied but black workers could

command between $75 and $150 a year in the 1820s and 1830s and up to $20 a month

during the 1850s. They worked as laborers, dockhands, domestics, laundresses,

gardeners, brick layers, stone masons, waiters, cooks, barbers, and in other capacities.

In many urban areas, as competing whites pointed out, slaves dominated certain

occupations. Although prohibited by law, self-hire was widespread and if runaways

could convince a potential employer that they had been sent by their owner to find work

they could be hired with few questions asked.xxvii

15

A few runaways, often the most ingenious, persistent, and lucky, made it to the

North. About twenty-five years old, quick-spoken, articulate, and clever, the Tennessee

slave Jim Lace set out in June 1839 for a free state. “This fellow has once before

attempted to make his escape to a free State and was taken in Kentucky on his way to

Illinois,” Asa Jackson, a farmer who lived a few miles west of Lebanon, explained. “I am

apprehensive that he will again make a similar attempt and probably aim for the same

State.” Among those who made it to the North were some who received assistance

from Quakers, the Underground Railroad, and anti-slavery whites.xxviii

While the picture for individual runaways in the South was not as bleak as that for

gangs of runaways, it was nevertheless one of failure. The overwhelming majority of

fugitives was captured, jailed, returned to their owners, and punished. Those who

remained out either in cities or towns or remote areas near their owners’ plantations, or

who made it to the so-called Promised Land in the North or Canada, remained a tiny

fraction of the runaway population. John Hope Franklin and I estimated that during the

1830s through the 1850s, perhaps only one or two thousand slaves a year made it to

the North out of a annual runaway population conservatively estimated at fifty thousand.

Those who began the flight in the lower tier of states were almost always

captured or came in of their own accord. On James Henry Hammond’s Silver Bluff

Plantation on the Savannah River in South Carolina between 1831 and 1855, there was

an average of two escapes per year (a total of fifty-three). Even though they often

received sustenance, support, and encouragement from slaves on the plantation as well

as help from slaves on neighboring plantations, not a single runaway gained permanent

freedom. Hammond was well aware that those who deserted were “lurking” about in a

nearby swamp. He waged a continuous but unsuccessful battle to stop the flow of food

and provisions to outlying blacks, including punishing all the slaves on his plantation for

the “misdeeds” of a few. Plantation management, Hammond ruefully commented, is

“like a war without the glory.”xxix

16

Those who persisted in absconding usually paid a heavy price. Most

contemporaries affirmed that what were called habitual or perpetual runaways received

cruel and brutal punishments. Slaves escaped with the mark of the whip on their backs,

irons on their ankles, missing fingers and toes, and brands on their cheeks and

forehead. The punishments of slaves in the Lower Mississippi River Valley seemed

especially severe. In 1833 one runaway, age about thirty, described as having sunken-

cheeks, and sulky looks, would not be difficult to spot, his owner reported. He had an

inch-high cross branded on his forehead, the letter “O” branded on his cheek, and the

word “Orleans” branded across his back.xxx The sheriff of Points Coupes Parish,

Louisiana, described a captured runaway in 1826 as having “an Iron collar three prongs

extending upwards” and “Many scars on his back and shoulders from the whip.”xxxi It

was habitual runaways who prompted the most harsh and brutal response from owners

and overseers.

Some scholars have suggested that this was a time when owners and slaves

came together and negotiated some type of compromise or accommodation. It made

sense, so the argument goes, that owners did not wish to damage their property and

that slaves who had no chance of remaining at large permanently would seek

concessions concerning family visitations, food allowances, hiring arrangements,

housing, or living conditions. The oft-quoted journal of slave owner Robert “Councillor”

Carter, the largest slaveholder in pre-Revolutionary Virginia, reveals how he discussed

family matters with runaways and sought to accommodate their requests. In response

to a paper discussing the harsh treatment of habitual runaways, one distinguished

scholar of slavery asserted, “Christian masters did not treat their slaves that way.”xxxii

17

In fact, Christian masters did treat their slaves that way, and worse. Some tried

to reason with their human property after a first or second escape attempt, but it was a

rare owner who did not inflict painful punishments following the fourth or fifth episode.

Moreover, the great majority of slave owners in the South were forced to confront the

problem. During his tour of the southern states Olmsted recounted that he did not visit

a single plantation where owners did not discuss the problem of runaways. It was so

common, he noted, that southern whites described it as “a disease–a monomania, to

which the negro race is peculiarly subject.” The New Orleans physician Samuel

Cartwright called it by another name, “drapetomania,” an hereditary disease afflicting

Negroes causing them to abscond. It should be kept in mind that “throughout the

South,” Olmsted concluded, “slaves are accustomed to ‘run away.’”xxxiii

Another current argument concerns sympathetic whites assisted fugitive blacks

in their quest for freedom. There was a network of conductors on the Underground

Railroad who guided slaves from station to station along routes that began just about

anywhere in the South, including Charleston, South Carolina. The recent publication of

Raymond Dobard and Jacqueline L. Tobin’s Hidden in Plain View: the Secret Story of

Quilts and the Underground Railroad, which has sold more than one hundred thousand

copies, the founding of the Underground Railroad and Freedom Center in Cincinnati,

with millions of dollars of state and private funding, and the efforts of the National Park

Service to designate sites that served as hideaways for fugitives are but a few examples

of how contemporaries wish to project the present into the past.xxxiv

18

Forest knew the risks he was taking when he ran away and enticed his brethren

to join him in the woods and swamps along the Lower Santee River. His life was one of

fear, anger, hatred, hostility, movement, and within a relatively short time, death. With

few exceptions the leaders of groups of outlying slaves suffered a similar fate. The

power of those in control was brought to bear with rapid efficiency against slaves who

sought to sustain themselves in freedom in the midst of the plantation South. If the

great majority of runaways did not die at the hands of a group of white planters led by

slave (who later received his freedom for his betrayal) theirs was largely a futile effort.

There was little in the way of accommodation or negotiation on the part of masters.

When runaway blacks were captured they faced harsh physical punishments, or sale to

a distant land, or both. What is surprising, given the results, was that the stream of

runaway slaves continued unabated over the decades and indeed increased as time

passed. It served as a constant reminder to the slaveholding class that the property

they were seeking to control was not controllable and the image they were trying to

project, as benevolent paternalistic masters, was a lie.

19

Endnotes: Maroonage and Flight:

An Overview

i. Petition of the Inhabitants of Claremont, Clarendon, St. John, St. Stevens, and

Richland Districts to the Senate of South Carolina, ca. 1824, Records of the General Assembly, #1874, South Carolina Department of Archives and History [hereafter SCDAH], in Loren Schweninger, ed., The Southern Debate Over Slavery: Petitions to Southern Legislatures, 1778-1864 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 83-85.

ii. Ibid.

iii. Phillip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 450.

iv. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 67, 120-21, 170.

v. Ibid.

vi. Herbert Aptheker, “Maroons Within the Present Limits of the United States,” Journal of Negro History, 24 (April 1939), 170-71.

vii. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 329.

viii. Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991), 51. See also idem, “Between Slavery and Freedom: Virginia Blacks in the American Revolution,” Journal of Southern History 49 (*1938), 375-98.

ix. Jeffrey Crow, “Slave Rebelliousness and Social Conflict in North Carolina, 1775-1802,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 37 (January 1980), 93-94.

x. Records of the General Assembly, Session Records, Petition of William L. Hill to the North Carolina General Assembly, ca. 1823, in Petitions (Miscellaneous, November 1820–January 1824, Box 4, North Carolina Division of Archives and History [hereafter NCDAH]; Report of the Committee on Claims, 8 December 1823, in House Committee Reports, Box 3, ibid.; Petition of John Rhem to the North Carolina General Assembly, November 1822, in House Committee Reports, November 1823-January 1824, Box 3, NCDAH; Report of the Committee of Claims, ca. 1824, ibid.

xi. Petition of the Citizens of Halifax County to the North Carolina General

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Assembly, 1844, in Schweninger, ed., The Southern Debate over Slavery, 188-190.

xii. Petition of Peter Gourdin to the South Carolina House of Representatives, 1835, #21 and #22, SCDAH; John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 89.

xiii. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), 30.

xiv. Petition of the Citizens of King William County to the Virginia General Assembly, 1843, in “Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks: Petitions to Southern Legislatures, 1775-1867,” microfilm edition, University Publications of America, 1999. The petition was rejected. Search: http://history.uncg.edu/slaverypetitions

xv. Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), ; Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974) ; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 158; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: the First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Phillip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1998); see especially Hugo Prosper Leaming, Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas (New York: Garland Publishers, 1995).

xvi. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 86-89.

xvii. See Gary Brana-Shute, editor. Resistance and Rebellion in Suriname: Old and New (Williamsburg, Va.: Dept. of Anthropology, College of William and Mary, 1990); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Rhett S. Jones, “White Settlers, White Settlers, Black Rebels: Jamaica in the Era of the First Maroon War, 1655-1738,” (Ph.D. dissertation: Brown University, 1976); idem, Brazilian Race Relations in Hemispheric Perspective (Boston: Trotter Institute Review, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990); Barbara Kopytoff, “The Maroons of Jamaica: an Ethnohistorical Study of Incomplete Polities, 1655-1905 (Ph.D. dissertation: University of Pennsylvania, 1973); idem, “The Early Political Development of Jamaican Maroon Societies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 35 (1978), 287-307; idem, "Religious Change Among the Jamaican

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Maroons: The Ascendance of the Christian God within a Traditional Cosmology," Journal of Social History 20 (1987), 463-484; Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 1st ed. (Garden City, N.Y., Anchor Press, 1973; 2d ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); idem., The Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bibliographical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); idem., To Slay the Hydra: Dutch Colonial Perspectives on the Saramaka Wars (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Karoma, 1983); David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2002); idem., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Altantic World (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina, 2001); idem., Slavery, War, and Revolution: the British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

xviii. Richard Price, The Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bibliographical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 1-2.

xix. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 243.

xx. A. T. Conrad to David Weeks, 16 December 1827, Weeks (David and Family) Papers, Special Collections Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. See also Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 293 n. 10.

xxi. Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 128-29.

xxii. Petition of John Jonah Murrell, et al., to the Speaker and Members of the South Carolina House of Representatives, 1829, Records of the General Assembly, #90, SCDAH, in Schweninger, ed., The Southern Debate over Slavery, 108. For related petitions, search: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/s01/schweninger.html

xxiii. Aptheker, “Maroons Within the Present Limits of the United States,” 179-82.

xxiv. Legislative Petitions, Petition of Samuel Templeman to the Virginia General Assembly, 21 December 1809, Westmoreland County, Virginia State Archives, Richmond, Virginia; John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 72-73.

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xxv. Copy of Orders from Major General John Joor[?] to the Colonel Commanding the 5th Regiment Mississippi Militia, 4 October 1832, and copy of Report of George H. Gordon, 8 October 1832, Record Group 47, Box 20, Petitions and Memorials, Mississippi Department of Archives and History; Records of the Inferior

Court, Glynn County, George, Petition of Hugh F. Grant, June 1848, Minutes of the Glynn Court of Ordinary [1812-1870], 119-20, 149-51, County Courthouse, Brunswick, Georgia.

xxvi. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 315.

xxvii. Franklin and Schlesinger, Runaway Slaves, 134.

xxviii. Tennessee Republican Banner, 24 June 1839.

xxix. Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 94, 95, 105.

xxx. New Orleans Bee, 21 October 1833, 2 May 1835, 11 November 1835.

xxxi. Louisiana Journal [St. Francisville], 26 November 1826, in A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, ed. Ulrich B. Phillips (Cleveland, Ohio: Arthur H. Clark, 1910), 2:88.

xxxii. See: Gerald Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).

xxxiii. Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country, 476.

xxxiv. Raymond Dobard and Jacqueline L. Tobin, Hidden in Plain View: the Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1999).

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